Online advertising has been a hot topic for the past week or so, with Ars Technica trying out an interesting, somewhat desperate experiment wherein they blocked access to their content for people using Adblock. Of course, if this were to become some kind of movement among publishers, it would probably just spark a technological cat-and-mouse game that would surely be reminiscent of DRM cracking or iPhone jailbreaking. But in their post-mortem, Ars states that it was a worthwhile awareness campaign, and I hope that's true. But I thought it would be a good idea to try to bring the collective OSNews brainpower together and crowdsource the idea of how to raise money for a web site in an age where advertising is increasingly un-viable.

The main reason there IS a community in ars is because the good content they provide... and content is not free.
So even tho they value the community, the community will ran away if they dont provide good content.

So, you say they should find a new way to get money, tbh, i bet there are GREAT minds working in google thinking the same but they still didnt come with another solution, so.. till then, its the only way they could keep paying their expenses.

Would Ars' content be any worse if they simply put up a pay wall? No, I don't think it would. Would Ars' content be any worse if the community wasn't there? Hard to say, but Ars doesn't strike me as a community website. The comments section is only just above Engadget.